Art

July 18, 2016

He's been called "The Picasso of pumpkin carving" and his pumpkins are stunningly spectacular, but Ray Villafane is also a remarkable sand sculptor. His “Elephant and Mouse,” created in collaboration with Long Island-based artist Sue Beatrice, is now on view at Arizona's Carefree Desert Gardens (Arizona is a lovely place - Villafane lives in Surprise, which is not far from Carefree, both just north of Phoenix).

From Phoenix magazine (which anoints Villafane as "the Sendak of sand sculpture"):

The sand sculpture depicts an elephant playing chess with a mouse, and is striking with its life-size scale and details, like the tiny hairs on the elephant’s head, eyelashes and tail (made from palm frond fibers), and tree rings in the stump. A bulging bag of peanuts lies to one side, with some spilling out of the sack and one that appears to be floating in midair, as if falling from the elephant’s mouth. “It’s magic,” Beatrice says, before pointing to a small stick connecting the elephant and the peanut. “[Ray] is over the top, and he can do anything. In addition to his artistic talent, he’s great at creative problem-solving. That’s just one example.”

December 02, 2015

I was delighted (and flattered) to be invited to participate in a multi-disciplinary symposium, held in Winchester in October, titled Chalk: Time, Sense, and Landscape, part of the town’s biannual 10 day arts festival. Winchester is securely rooted in the chalk, but while this was the overall theme title of the festival, and inspired by Thomas Huxley’s public lecture On a Piece of Chalk, this symposium ranged widely over distinctly non-calcareous themes. Organised by sound artist Sebastiane Hegarty, its aims were to explore “worlds beyond and beneath the visible” and “sound and the unseen or imagined landscape.”

I thought long and hard as to how the views of a geologist might contribute to these themes and decided to explore the cultural and individual perceptions of landscape that I had touched on in The Desert. Borrowing from Antoine de Exupéry, I titled the talk “Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…” and, given the interest of the audience in soundscapes, began with a recording of booming sand dunes – the acoustics and the sound set-up were so good that even I was startled.

The summary of the talk was as follows:

As the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry remind us, the landscapes of the desert notoriously play havoc with all human senses. Rare sounds become amplified, aromas, other than some kind of unfathomable minerality, are entirely absent, and the range of what seems visible becomes exaggerated. Our sense of scale is comprehensively challenged – a single sand grain and a sea of dunes vie for our attention (and seem equally fascinating). The great chronicler of the deserts of the American southwest, Edward Abbey, wrote: “There is something about the desert that human sensibility cannot assimilate.” Our response to what is seen, and unseen, is very much subjective and cultural, the perception of landscape, time, and scale being quite different for the insider and the outsider. And then there are the stories that the landscape tells the geologist…

I have now been alerted to a review of the symposium by Jodie Dalgleish for the New Zealand based art review EyeContact, and her full essay. I much appreciate her discussion of my talk, and, throwing all modesty to the desert wind, take the liberty of copying it here.

Shifting Topologies

Beginning the second part of the day, geologist, sand expert and author Michael Welland charges my imagination with a desert field recording, made by French researcher Stéphane Douady. It sets up palpable vibrations within the room, an elemental sonic shaking and fullness, bringing to my mind Don Ihde’s description, in Listening and Voice, of the auditory imagination as a sound field that surrounds and invades the imagining subject and places them at the centre of their own auditory space. Revealed by Welland to be the singing, or booming, of a sand dune—40 of which have been identified by geologists as unique in their song from Chile to the Gobi Desert, it is a natural and known sensory part of the Bedouins’ life and environment, with given names for such places ‘the mountain of drums’ and ‘the thunder of singers.’ Referring also to the aboriginal people of Australia, Welland recounts the affecting story of the way Alfred Canning forged a stock-route in the first decade of the 20th century, constructing 51 wells across the ‘outback,’ capturing indigenous inhabitants and torturing them for the location of their water sources. Canning’s resulting map shows a strip through the landscape, defined only by his route and wells. Whereas, a 3.2 x 5 metre painting, Martumili Ngurra (This is all Martu’s Home), made in 2009 by six Matu women of the Martumili collective, reveals a network of stories, information and knowledge in a desert that is far from empty, a living and sung landscape where every part is named, over generations. As Welland illustrates further, with reference to Yi-fu Tuan’s landmark book of humanistic and philosophical geography Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values, there is an unseen ‘landscape’ that is formed by a cultural and personal view. Concepts such as time, scale and horizon change drastically depending on where you have made your home, and what you have learned. For him, as a geologist, the Sahara Desert is also, simultaneously, the Green Sahara with its verdant green valleys and the detailed traces of rivers etched in stone beneath the sand. ‘Landscape,’ I am reminded, is always a flexible cultural construct, and ‘place,’ one of the affective bond of inhabitation. In my own mind since, I am made to wonder about the soundscape, such as that of a field recording. What does the inhabitant, and the inhabiting recorder, of a visible, or non-visible, place understand and imagine vis-a-vis someone from an entirely different place, and does it matter? Does the sound of the not fully known, such as Welland’s dune song, open auditory spaces more fundamental to experience, as might the detail of the known open spaces to another kind of attention? And how might a topographical understanding of ourselves and our environments affect us as artists and makers?

Thank you, Jodie, and thank you Sebastiane for inviting me in the first place – I enjoyed immensely thinking and working on the talk and the diverse and stimulating events of the day. And thanks to Victoria Rick for the photo.

September 29, 2015

Sunagoyomi, the sand calendar. Not an hourglass, but a yearglass, the centre piece of the Nima Sand Museum in Japan. Turn it, and one year later the last of its estimated 629 billion grains of sand will fall (no, I haven’t checked the maths, but that’s the number reported). I mentioned this remarkable sandglass almost six year ago when I was celebrating the first year of this blog, and now it (the sandglass, not the blog) has just made it into the Guiness Book of World Records. From The Japan Times, September 20:

Jumbo Shimane hourglass recognized by Guinness as world’s largest

MATSUE, SHIMANE PREF. – An hourglass at a museum in Shimane Prefecture that measures the duration of a year has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest, the museum said Sunday.

The hourglass, built at the Nima Sand Museum in Oda, is 5.2 meters tall and has a diameter of 1 meter. It began ticking on Jan. 1, 1991, using quartz sand from Yamagata Prefecture. One ton of the sand is designed to fall through the glass container over a year.

The record was published on Sept. 10.

Previously, the world’s largest hourglass in Guinness World Records was 1.06 meters tall with a diameter of 38 cm. It was made by an American.

The recognition came after the publisher of Guinness World Records confirmed the size of the museum’s hourglass and sounded it out about registering the device, a museum official said.

The hourglass, named Sunagoyomi (sand calendar), is housed inside a glassy, pyramid-shaped structure and serves as the museum’s centerpiece. The device is turned upside down once every year to start the count again.

It is filled with 629,100,000,000 grains of the "singing" Osodani sand, which weigh 1,000,368 g (2,205 lb 6.88 oz). The sand, sifted to ensure that each grain measures an average of 0.11 mm, flows continuously through a nozzle measuring 0.84 mm in diameter.

I think it’s great that not only does Japan have a museum dedicated to sand, but that the world’s biggest sandglass has now been officially recognised – I just can’t understand is why it’s referred to as an “hourglass.”

[Image at the head of this post by David Kawabata, via flickr and creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.]

July 14, 2015

Images of art and science can be visually stunning at first glance, and then emotionally stunning when the viewer becomes aware of what is depicted. Think microscope images of cancer cells, or some of paintings of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst.

A while ago, I wrote of the tragic testimony of sand grains from the Normandy beaches, microscopic fragments of steel from the carnage. And then, a few days ago, I came across a piece in The New Yorker on a project titledWar Sand by the photographer Donald Weber, in partnership with Kevin Robbie of the Department of Physics at Queen’s University. The image above is but one haunting example of the collection resulting from their work, and here, another:

This is Weber’s statement about the project:

Wartime sacrifice on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 is well known—massive casualties, but ultimately successful. Allied soldiers, numbering over 156,000, managed to penetrate into German-occupied France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and stoutly held their positions despite repeated counter-attacks by German divisions.

Today, the remains of vast quantities of Allied and German war material lie embedded in the beaches of Normandy, mixed in with the natural grains of sand. Shrapnel, bullet casings and armour plate are still there, 70 years later, transformed by the sea, salt, and sun into an array of micro-artifacts that span the divide between technology and nature. Archaeologists have said that up to 8 percent of this sand is made up of war shrapnel. Waves, storms, and rust will wipe this microscopic archaeology from coastal Normandy in another hundred years, and with it, the physical remembrances of WWII.

In June of 2013, I walked the beaches of coastal Normandy, the same month of the Allied invasion, collecting hundreds of sand samples from each of the five D-Day landing beaches (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword). I sent these back to Canada.

Working closely with Kevin Robbie of the Department of Physics at Queen’s University, we utilized a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and optical microscope to photograph the recovered sand. These microscopes have the ability to see things invisible to the naked eye, and allowed us to look at the chemical composition of the samples and to see which particles were war detritus.

It was here that I found trace evidence of the war effort from this pivotal moment in WWII and intimately recorded that which time and nature are progressively eroding from our collective memory.

I returned later that year to photograph the beaches themselves, as they are today. There, so many different elements came into play: the intensity of the landscape, the loneliness and beauty of the beaches packed up for the winter, the wind and the unpredictable weather. These beaches bore little resemblance to the images I knew from LIFE magazine and the history books.

War Sand asks questions about history and geology, and about memory and time.

These are questions for any visitor to the Normandy beaches, and I urge the reader to visit the links above to this extraordinary project.

January 17, 2015

No, it's not alien art. A robotic beach artist has created giant drawings in the sand. Developed by Paul Beardsley from Disney Research Zurich and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the wheeled robot can recreate a drawing sent to it from a phone or tablet.

It computes a path across the sand that approximates the artwork and sets off. A rake attached to its rear etches the pattern in the sand. Each drawing takes about 10 minutes, and the idea is that the robot could be controlled remotely, turning the beach into a digitally controlled sketchbook.

Since the robot moves on three wheels, it is better at creating smooth curves rather than sharp corners. To carve a right angle in the sand, it draws a line then lifts the rake, before using a laser scanner and an inertial sensor to reposition itself so it can trace the intersecting line.

The team plans to equip the robot with a range of tools so that it can imprint a variety of textures or erase previous markings, and is also taking inspiration from the Nazca Lines – ancient motifs produced in the Nazca desert in Peru. "We would like to make huge sand art that amazes people," says Beardsley.

The robot was presented at Techfest in Bombay, India, in late December.

January 04, 2015

What, you might reasonably ask, is this image? This is, after all, a blog about topics arenaceous, and folded paper ornaments would, while somewhat seasonal, hardly seem relevant. But a couple of explanations: first, ever since I was a kid I have loved those two-dimensional paper ornaments that magically unfold into three-dimensional glory (I still do). Second, this is a blog about all things sandy, but, with the forthcoming arrival of the new book, it is also becoming a blog about all things arid. And third, it will continue to be a blog about things I personally find compelling, stimulating, fascinating and provocative.

But still…

Having just embarked on a new year, I’m sure that I’m not alone in hoping, despite all the depressing evidence to the contrary, that 2015 will bring improvements, innovations and creative solutions that make genuine and sustainable changes to our world. Ideas, that’s what we need, creative ideas tested and put into practice. And in a world where we now see record numbers of refugees – tens of millions, plus the “internally displaced” - it’s an idea derived from folding paper, “honeycomb” ornaments and origami, that I would like to highlight here. For this is what the image at the head of this post is about:

Jordanian-Canadian architect and designer Abeer Seikaly won the Lexus (yes, the guys who make the cars) Design Award in 2013 for her collapsible woven refugee shelters. She is now living in Amman, Jordan, well-placed to witness displaced people and the traditional variations between nomadic and sheltered lives. As she writes in her design brief (please look at that link):

Human life throughout history has developed in alternating waves of migration and settlement. The movement of people across the earth led to the discovery of new territories as well as the creation of new communities among strangers forming towns, cities, and nations. Navigating this duality between exploration and settlement, movement and stillness is a fundamental essence of what it means to be human.

In the aftermath of global wars and natural disasters, the world has witnessed the displacement of millions of people across continents. Refugees seeking shelter from disasters carry from their homes what they can and resettle in unknown lands, often starting with nothing but a tent to call home. “Weaving a home” reexamines the traditional architectural concept of tent shelters by creating a technical, structural fabric that expands to enclose and contracts for mobility while providing the comforts of contemporary life (heat, running water, electricity, storage, etc.)

These are not only portable shelters that are elegant and distinctive, but they are designed to provide electricity and water. As described in this report:

The outer solar-powered skin absorbs solar energy that is then converted into usable electricity, while the inner skin provides pockets for storage – particularly at the lower half of the shelters. And a water storage tank on the top of the tent allows people to take quick showers. Water rises to the storage tank via a thermosiphoning system and a drainage system ensures that the tent is not flooded… Well ventilated and lit, the shelter opens up in the summer and huddles down during cold winters. But most importantly, it allows refugees to have some semblance of security, some semblance of home.

As far as I can see, this apparently brilliant idea remains “conceptual but proven to work.” Could 2015 possibly bring it to reality?

October 13, 2013

I realise that this post is later than it should have been, but I would be
delinquent if I did not note this extraordinary event. A few years ago, on a
dismal and gusty day somehow appropriate for the location, I visited the
Normandy town of Arromanches, whose beach, on the 6th June, 1944, was a focus
for the D-Day landings.

At Arromanches last month, to mark International Peace Day, artists Andy Moss and Jamie
Wardley of Sand in your
eye, turned into a very moving reality their extraordinary
concept of the ‘Fallen Project.’ “The objective was to make a visual
representation of 9000 people drawn in the sand which equates the number of
Civilians, Germans Forces and Allies that died during the D-day landings, 6th
June during WWII as an example of what happens in the absence of peace. . . . On
the day we had 60-70 confirmed volunteers that had travelled from around the
world to help. We knew that this was not enough to complete the project in the
4.5 hours that we had so at 3pm when we were about to begin we were overwhelmed
by the hundreds of people that turned up to help. . . . [and] took stencils and
rakes in hand and embarked on drawing the 9000”

July 24, 2013

As the residents of Breezy
Point continue on their path back to normality after the ravages of
superstorm Sandy, part of that normality is that Larry
Deemer has been out and about on the beach again, superbly documenting the
shape-shifting art of the sands. Here, many thanks to Larry, is a selection of his latest photographs –
enjoy!

July 10, 2013

A few years ago I
reported on my visit to San Francisco's Exploratorium, a place of wonder for,
as they say, “children of all ages.” It has now moved to a brand-new facility on
the city’s piers, and I have to admit that I am excited at the idea – as yet
that’s all it is – of seeing it. A number of the exhibits which, unsurprisingly,
I found particularly fascinating, were the works of Ned Kahn. On his website he has this statement:

The confluence of science and art has fascinated me throughout my career. For
the last twenty years, I have developed a body of work inspired by atmospheric
physics, geology, astronomy and fluid motion. I strive to create artworks that
enable viewers to observe and interact with natural processes. I am less
interested in creating an alternative reality than I am in capturing, through my
art, the mysteriousness of the world around us.

My artworks frequently incorporate flowing water, fog, sand and light to
create complex and continually changing systems. Many of these works can be seen
as “observatories” in that they frame and enhance our perception of natural
phenomena. I am intrigued with the way patterns can emerge when things flow.
These patterns are not static objects, they are patterns of behavior – recurring
themes in nature.

In my humble view, Kahn succeeds brilliantly and compellingly in capturing
“the mysteriousness of the world around us.” Go to his website and enjoy – and,
if you can, go to the Exploratorium.

March 14, 2013

Steinmetz's images from a paraglider provide a unique view of some of our planet's most beautiful landscapes, somehow a link between satellite views and "ground truth." I don't do commercials on this blog, but I can only recommend this - it's remarkably good value for the quality of the images and the stunning scope.